Mountains

August 18, 2012

MOUNTAIN - Cranberry Lake is a beautiful location, but it's one of many remote Adirondack hamlets in danger of backsliding into something less than a fully functional community. So it's wonderful that it had an incredibly generous patron. Robert Damoth wasn't very well known in Cranberry Lake, except in the library, after he retired there from New Jersey after a telephone company career. Yet this avid reader and fisherman bequeathed his entire $2.5 million estate to the community via a fund managed by the Adirondack Community Trust. Every year for the foreseeable future, the fund will issue five grants expected to total about $15,000 each: four-year university scholarships for Clifton-Fine Central School graduates, the Clifton Community Library, Cranberry Lake Fire and Rescue, the Clifton-Fine Hospital in Star Lake and a wild card to be determined by the Clifton-Fine Economic Development Corporation.

What a generous and thoughtful man. It always amazes us when someone leaves their entire estate to fulfill community needs, but Mr. Damoth's gift goes further than most. It may keep an Adirondack community going.

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MOUNTAIN - Kirk Sullivan's new short film, "The Come Up," is very appropriately titled - with it, the Saranac Lake native is now poised to rise in the filmmaking world. After two years of working for "Matrix" producer Joel Silver, this 10 minute Hollywood heist tale is technically miles ahead of his Saranac Lake-based "Loyalty's Lines" (2004) - as good a story as that was. "The Come Up" looks fully pro; many viewers at its Aug. 8 premiere in Lake Placid remarked that it would be a contender to beat anything that's ever come through town with the Manhattan Short Film Festival. With a calling card like this, Mr. Sullivan seems ready to become another local luminary Saranac Lakers can brag about.